But is conducting regular reporting through Google Adwords a worthwhile or worthless practice for those in PPC? I’m sure you already can sense the opinion of this blogger – I mean come on, why would Google place so much information at your disposal if it was all pointless and added no value? Regular reporting is an incredibly worthwhile practice, but it is essential that you know what you are looking for, and when you find it, knowing what you are going to do with that information.

So what sort of reports should we be running on a regular basis, and why are they so valuable?

Account/Campaign Report

Either of the above reports can be incredibly useful when the unit of time is broken down to be viewed by an hourly period. In this format, we are able to see how many impressions and clicks an account or individual campaign is receiving, which are then broken down by each hour of the day.

Why would this useful you may be thinking?

Primarily, this type of report is fantastic for assessing how well your daily budget is performing. If you start to discover a trend in the report where from 8pm onwards most days that the impressions and clicks drop substantially, or are non-existent, then it would be safe to say that your budget is running out far too early. The answer? Drop your bids and assess again a few days later.

Of course, this only works if your campaign is set to accelerated delivery – if it’s set to standard delivery, you will see your budget lasting all day, whether it’s sufficient or not. If you are using standard delivery, you should run an Impression Share report.

Campaign Report with the use of Impression Share (IS)

The use of Impression Share (or ‘IS’ as it can be referred to through Google), is a way of taking the data available from a standard Campaign Report and moving up to a whole other level of detail. The report is run in a very similar way to that of the report described above, with the only alteration being the selection of the ‘Lost Impression Share’ options in the data filters section. The lost impression share can be split into two variables; by rank and by budget.

‘Lost impression share by rank’ allows us to see the percentage of impressions a campaign has lost out on due to an advert position appearing too low (normally by dropping down onto page 2 of search results). For example, if the report displays that a campaign received 1000 impressions in a given day, but had a 50% lost impression share by rank, then we know that we have lost out on a potential further 1000 impressions due to our adverts displaying too low down. This of course would then allow us to assess whether the bid prices need to be increased to boost our advert positions and take greater advantage of total traffic.

A lost impression share by budget is a more detailed version of the campaign/account report mentioned earlier. Similarly to a lost impression share by rank, this will tell us how many impressions were lost due to the budget being spent. If we are seeing that by 8pm the budget has spent, but for the remaining 4 hours of the day we are missing out on further impressions, then decisions need to made about increasing the budget or decreasing the bids. If your advert delivery is set to standard, the daily lost impression share by budget will tell you whether your budget is sufficient, given your bids.

Search Query Report

A search query report is probably the most common report that will be run, or more appropriately, should be running in any typical Adwords campaign.

For those not familiar, a search query report allows us to see all the keyword searches that led to clicks on a campaign over a given period of time. This type of report is absolutely fantastic for a campaign heavily focussed on a number of phrase match and broad match terms. It can be used to identify any additional useful keyword terms that weren’t originally identified when the campaign was set up, allowing us to add these in as exact match keywords going forward. On the reverse side, it will also display any rogue keyword searches that have no relevance to the campaign, which can then be added in as negative keywords.

Take the following as an example:

We have a client that publicises themselves as a public speaker through their own personal website, and has a PPC campaign set up to aid this promotion. One keyword on the campaign is the phrase match “famous talking”. Through a recent search query report, we were able to identify a search had been made for ‘famous talking speakers’. Great – that can go as an exact match from now on I thought. A little further down the search query report, I discover that the campaign had also received a click for ‘famous talking dogs’. Not really what we were looking for! So in that goes as a negative, never to see the light of day again.

Imagine those that don’t run regular search query reports and are missing out on the above? Not only would you be missing out on identifying new key terms for the campaign, but more worryingly, a heck of a lot of clicks and spend could be heading right down the drain.

So is regular reporting worthwhile or worthless in any PPC campaign? I think I’d go as far as to say that it’s essential.

Fortunately, this trait of mine doesn’t extend into my day-to-day working profession, which is a good job, as impatience and PPC don’t tend to be the best of friends!

So why is patience such a virtue in PPC?

Without a doubt, the use of PPC as part of the online marketing mix can offer fantastic return on investment due to its measurability on a number of metrics such as click volumes, bounce rates and cost per conversion. But whilst it would be great to produce amazing results on day 1 of any campaign for our clients, this often can be quite unrealistic.

The work that goes into optimising a PPC campaign will, more often than not, initially follow a similar format each time – extensive keyword research, effective grouping of keywords, regular reporting, advert testing and so on. But that’s not to say that the way campaigns respond will follow the same format. Every market is different, and therefore you can expect varying results. The way a website looks and operates within that market can vary the results even further (especially if it isn’t very user friendly!). With that in mind, it can take time to find that winning formula, with no single factor a guarantee of success over any other.

With the need to work on a campaign over time also comes the need patience, which is where the link is made. So where specifically should it be adopted?

Bid adjustments

“It’s 2pm, and XYCorp’s campaign has only had four clicks so far today with no conversions! It had 30 clicks this time yesterday and 4 conversions – I don’t get it!”. We’ve all been there, but panicking and making rash bid adjustments isn’t going to help. It might just be having a bad start to the day, or there may be other factors beyond your control. Either way, it’s too early to make snap judgements. Be patient and assess again tomorrow – if the poor performance continues, then look to take action.

Advert testing

You’ve decided to write a new advert for that Adgroup with the poor clickthrough or conversion rate. How long do you leave it running before making a decision on its effectiveness? Well, this all depends on the levels of traffic that ad group is seeing. With 10 impressions a week, it’s nearly impossible to tell how well an advert is going to perform after a couple of days. Patience is key, certainly at least until you have enough data to make an informed decision.

Performance of keywords

Using the same theory of giving adverts time to prove whether they have the ability to perform or not, the same approach must be adopted for keywords as well. It can be very tempting to drop a keyword and add it in as a negative if its clickthrough rate is low, and thus potentially harming a campaign’s Quality Score, or if it is failing to convert despite high clicks and spend. But a loss of patience and rash decisions do not work well here. A keyword can have a poor clickthrough rate for many reasons such as a poorly written advert, strong competition or low advert position. A keyword can also fail to convert due to a weak landing page or website in general – this doesn’t necessary mean that the keyword is poor. It is therefore vitally important that all avenues are investigated before action is taken, as you could be removing keywords that in different circumstances could perform very well for a campaign.

So there you have it. Patience is most certainly a virtue… well between the hours of 9-5 it is for me. At all other times, I still reserve my right to sigh heavily in frustration when the person at the cash machine in front of me takes 10 minutes to check their balance!

It appears that the percentage of clicks going on Paid Search is falling, which is potentially a misleading statistic (see my blog on Google and the 80:20 ratio). But they make another, very interesting point.  They indicate that the biggest fall is on brand-name keywords, and quote Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim, who says:
“Is that likely due to a reduction in spend, or Orbitz et al figuring out that they really don’t need to spend so much on paid advertising–considering they’re #1 in the organic results?”

Leaving aside the fact that, in the UK at least, Orbitz are still brand-bidding, this is quite an interesting trend, if true.

The question of whether to bid on your brand name or not has been the subject of many blogs in the industry over the years, but most people are in agreement that you should certainly at least consider bidding on your name.

Back in 2006, Scott Woodard (also at Marketing Pilgrim) recommended bidding on alternative spellings and  mis-spellings of your name, and even slogans: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2006/12/9-cost-effective-ppc-branding-strategies.html

But the obvious argument that you get from clients is that if they are appearing top for their brand name, and people are looking for them by name, they were going to get the traffic anyway. There is certainly some truth in this, as a large percentage of the clicks on the PPC advert would cannibalise the natural clicks you were going to get anyway. So why bother?

Ian Lurie at Conversation Marketing, and Dave Davis at Redfly Marketing both make good arguments in favour of brand bidding: http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2008/03/defend_yourself_bid_on_your_br.htm
http://www.redflymarketing.com/blog/5-reasons-you-should-be-bidding-on-your-company-name/
To summarise, these are the critical benefits:
1) The traffic’s cheap. You’ll get a big advantage on your Quality Score, and your clickthrough rate will be high (giving you another QS boost). So in most cases, you’ll only have to pay pence to appear for your brand name. And this spend will often represent only a very small percentage of your advertising spend.
2) Other people can bid on your brand name. There are no rules against it anymore, and if you don’t bid on your brand name, there’s a decent chance that one of your competitors will appear at the top of the search results when somebody is looking for you. It’s like driving past Sainsburys and Asda to get to Tesco – it’s inevitable that you’ll lose some customers, it’s just a question of how many…
3) Natural Search results are in a constant state of flux. It’s quite possible that your website won’t be top for your brand name all of the time, particularly if it’s quite a common name, or consists of an English phrase. This is particularly an issue if you’re a relatively small company, and your website doesn’t have much age or a lot of links to it.
4) Controlling Your Message. You can control exactly what people see when they search for you. You can show your latest promotion, and perhaps more importantly, land them on a page of your choice.
5) You may not rank that well for misspellings of your name. Not everyone knows how to spell your brand name. We used to have an account for somebody who sold Wedgwood products, but I found that more people spelled it Wedgewood than were getting the name right.

From this, it sounds like a no-brainer. But it may not be quite that straightforward. There are a number of questions you should ask before making a decision.
1) What’s it going to cost? We’ve got a client who pays nearly £3 per click to bid on their brand name, despite getting clickthrough rates of 20% – 40%. The reason for this, aside from the high value of the traffic, is the fact that their name is also a common phrase that people search for.
2) Is anyone else bidding on your brand name? If you are a new website, or a relatively small player in the market, there’s a good chance that they aren’t. In which case, if you are top of the search results, you’ll lose very little traffic, if any.

Whether you decide to bid on your name or not, you’ll certainly want to make sure that your affiliates aren’t allowed to bid on your brand. This is a fairly standard clause in affiliate contracts, but there are plenty of unscrupulous affiliates out there who will ‘accidentally’ bid on your brand…

To come back to the original point, it appears that more and more advertisers are stopping their brand-bidding. Why is this?

A few possibilities spring to mind. Firstly, it’s possible that businesses are dropping their PPC campaigns completely. This would certainly fit with the other results in the E-Consultancy report, but it doesn’t really tally with results that I’ve been seeing recently. With a few exceptions, competition appears as high as ever during this recession.

In the past, businesses have often cut their marketing budgets when times were hard – something that has always made little sense to business analysts. Based entirely on my experiences, it appears that this just doesn’t seem to be true this time around.

Another possibility is the effect of competitor brand bidding on your Quality Score. If you’re a small advertiser, bidding on keywords with very high traffic volumes, and very low clickthrough rates, can have a very serious impact on your Account Quality Score, undermining every other keyword in your campaign, for very little reward. On many of my accounts, I’ve removed competitor names, in order to improve the overall account quality.

If this is a common conclusion, and fewer people are bidding on competitor terms, perhaps the argument for defensive bidding is lessened. But I doubt that this is that commonplace – there are very few people out there worrying about their Account Quality Score, perhaps because Google don’t seem to like talking about it…

So, should you bid on your brand name?

On this, I tend to agree with Anil Batra: http://webanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/01/should-you-be-paying-for-clicks-on-your_15.html. Testing is critical if the spend on your brand name is going to be a significant amount of money. Work out how much traffic your brand name drives from natural search only, then add PPC and see to what extent it increases, and at what cost.

This is really the only way to be certain, but if you do decide to bid on your brand name, there is one thing you must do – split it out from the rest of the campaign, at least in the reporting. Typically, the performance of your brand name will be much better than other keywords, and combining them to analyse the performance of your account will make the performance look better than it really is.

For example, suppose that your breakeven cost per conversion is £20. You get a report from your Agency reporting 100 conversions at £15 each (total spend £1500). You’ve made £500, so you’re happy.

But you ask them to break out the brand name, and they show you that your brand name generated 50 conversions at a cost of £2 each, and the other keywords generated 50 conversions at £28 each.

Suddenly things aren’t looking so good. You’re clearly losing money on the rest of your account, but it’s being disguised if the data isn’t being separated out. A good agency will generally break your performance down into Adgroups and Campaigns in your reports, but there are a few out there who don’t…

In summary, I’d say that bidding on your brand name is almost always a good idea, so if you aren’t, I’d definitely test it.

I then attended Search around the world: US, Europe and Asia which explored search markets in other countries, namely China, Germany, Russia and Brazil. This had some very useful stats around search engine usage, user behaviour and tips on entering a local search market. I will present these stats once the slides are made available to me. But this was a must see for anyone considering search in another country.

Next was Search Marketing Best Practice. This was put on by the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) and covered intellectual property relating to SEO copy and PPC accounts, it also covered trademarking and some top tips on what to look for when choosing an agency. Informative presentation overall but nothing revolutionary or shocking came out of it.

There was then a panel discussing how to measure success in a 2.0 world. The was a lot of discussion around different analytics packages In the end the discussion boiled down to ensuring you have defined your KPIs and building your web analytics package around them. No one should just be looking at visits and bounce rate as a measure of success.

The final session I would like to report on was Matt Bailey’s excellent presentation on Analytics: Data Into Action. This again was focused around showing success, but also how you need to act upon your data. It focused on segmentation as a way of looking at your data and making decisions from it. This was a must see, for all types. I will be trying out some of Matt’s suggestions in the coming weeks, I will report back on any success.